Candace found the door of her nearest neighbor’s house hanging open. Her despair growing, she stopped in the front yard, staring into the doorway, at furniture and dust motes that were quiet beyond silence.
“Mister Fullbright?”
No answer. She scanned down the street and didn’t see a soul. No music played, no leaf blowers buzzed, no dogs barked.
She turned back to the Fullbrights’ front door and peeked her head in, seeing no one. But the phone sat on an end table beside the couch.
Candace dashed for it, lifted it, and moaned in despair. Then she caught sight of something outside that made her heart sink deeper.
The telephone pole that bordered the Fullbrights’ property had been chopped down.
Mr. Fullbright, having tried to stop the perpetrator, lay dead nearby, his upper half separated by several bloody, gut-strewn feet from his lower, his shotgun still in his cold dead hands, a construction paper mask of a sad moose stapled to his face.
Candace dropped the phone. She backed toward the door, then turned to run, stopping at the edge of the next yard, where the windows of the house were splashed with blood.
Another house: a wrecked body lying on the walkway, the conical hat of a garden gnome driven through his or her stomach, another custom mask.
Next house: a woman’s face pierced by the pointy teeth of the picket fence it lay on, a chicken mask flapping around the wound. A broken body lay across a front porch rail, Halloween lights wrapped around its neck.
“No…” Candace imagined mile upon mile of corpses, perhaps the world over, all sporting construction paper masks, all part of Everett’s fevered Halloween celebration. “Everett, no…”
She realized that Everett would—and maybe even could—remake the world as a vast Halloween mural.
She hid both sides of her periphery as she ran, crying, into the road’s horizon. “Not the parade! Not the parade! Not Stuart!”
She ran till her breath was ragged, trying not to see the unending crime scene on both sides.
In her periphery, she glimpsed a pair of older kids, Omar Lindstrom and Peggy Pike, pre-pre-engaged as of last Thursday, posed in an embrace, their entrails twined like a pigtail braid. They shared a single mask: a buck-toothed, bright-eyed chipmunk.
She screamed, falling to the ground, scraping and twisting her knee, turning her face away from the grotesque tableau.
As she crawled toward the other side of the road, she spotted a bicycle parked at the edge of a driveway.
Her resolve renewed, she stood and limped toward it.
* * * *
Under the demon dusk, a 1965 Chevy C-10 pickup, its bed filled with pumpkins, puttered toward the tunnel of high treetops just beyond the bullet-holed sign announcing Ember Hollow town proper, dead ahead.
Everett, in his senselessly composed costume of vampire’s cape, executioner’s hood, and shark grin, ambled in the middle of the road on a direct course toward the tree tunnel.
The C-10 pulled alongside him and stopped. Everett was set to raise the fondue fork hidden up the sleeve of his father’s coat—until he saw the dead man in the passenger seat.
Enrique, farmhand by trade, theater artist by hobby, was the truck’s passenger, dressed like a fresh corpse. The rubber scar across his neck glistened with fake blood. It was a two-for-one getup, celebrating both Halloween and Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead.
“Hola señor! Habla Español?” Enrique asked.
Everett beamed at him, entranced by the fantastic makeup.
Enrique looked at the driver, Guillermo, whose costume, a sinister diablo, bore the same exquisite artistry. No less than four months ago, Enrique had glued real goat horns onto a plastic mask, cast from a gelatin mold of the ever-patient Guillermo’s face.
The devil mask was made with separate teeth from a high-end costume supplier. A heavy flowing crimson cape, plastic trident, and sharp black glue-on nails completed the look. Everett was awestruck.
Despite his mask’s sinister grin, Guillermo was friendly. “Eh, do you go to parade?” He popped a thumb toward the pumpkins piled in the truck bed.
Everett admired the mound of orange beauties.
“Need a lift, amigo?”
Everett climbed into the back and settled in with joy in his heart, hugging a pumpkin in each arm as Guillermo accelerated.
* * * *
The young mother canoodled her daughter’s nose, forgetting that she had on blue makeup till she saw it smeared on the little girl. She smiled at Elaine Barcroft, taking a tissue from her purse to wipe the mess.
“Oh, leave it,” Elaine said. “We’re going to be painting faces anyway.”
“Oh, that’s right.” The mom stood. “You be a good girl for Mrs. Barcroft and Mrs. Lott, okay, Tina?”
The little girl nodded, though signs of separation anxiety were blooming on her little face.
“Come here, Tina!” Leticia chimed, grabbing Tina’s hand and leading her away before the tears could come. “Wait till you see all the fun stuff we’re going to do tonight!”
As a babysitting team, Elaine and Leticia were as tight as the Outlines were as musicians. They handled temperamental children and picky parents with equal aplomb, one reassuring where the other had to be firm, and vice versa. They had spoken of opening a day care but decided that their own families were far too important—and needy.
For Ma, losing a husband had made her cling to her two boys. She could not consider anything that might distract her from them, no matter how independent they became.
As for Leticia, Mr. Barcroft’s death had shaken her as well. Her husband was a law enforcement officer after all, and operating under an umbrella of controversy thanks to the incident with Naples. She took the role of mother seriously.
As little Tina joined her age mates, Elaine and Leticia came together for consultation. “Is it me, or do we have about twice as many kids this year?” Leticia asked.
“A lot of folks are coming in from farther out of town. I hope Hudson and the deputies don’t have a hard time.”
Leticia nudged Elaine. “You do know why all these people are here, don’t you?”
Elaine knew, but was almost afraid to acknowledge it.
“They’re coming to see your boy.”
Elaine held her hand to her mouth, awed by the notion that her son was on the verge of becoming a rock star. “Let’s turn on the TV,” she said. “It should be on the news soon.”
Leticia made a funny O with her mouth and hugged Elaine’s arm. “Kit Calloway! Yum yum!”
“Uh-huh,” agreed Elaine. “To go, please!”
* * * *
The local station broke from its telethon of Hammer Studios horror classics for an update from Main Street, where Elaine and Leticia’s crush, Kit Calloway, wearing a tie silk-screened with dancing mummies, smiled into the camera with just the right whimsy. “Hello, viewers and booers! I’m on Main Street in downtown Ember Hollow—make that Haunted Hollow—where hundreds have gathered for the beginning of the annual Pumpkin Parade!”
He turned to the costumed crowd behind him, and they whooped, raised their hands, and made monster motions.
Calloway turned back. “As you can see, we’re having a great time, and eager to see Ember Hollow’s own Chalk Underlines perform!” Although he misspoke, the crowd cheered.
“If you can’t make it out to see the festivities yourself, don’t worry! We’ll be bringing you frequent updates throughout the evening!”
* * * *
Hudson Lott and most of the other deputies were concentrated at the parade’s starting point.
Hudson resisted the temptation to lean against the light pole behind him. Under the browning sky, he watched the parade-goers gather by the hundreds at the edge of the street, milling, dancing, mugging in their elaborate costumes.
Figures in family-friendly costumes—local school mascots, firemen, and deputies—walked along the barricade, handing out candy, T-shirts, glow bracelets, and school supplies.
From a darkened alley just two blocks away, Ruth emerged, costumed as a rag doll. The outfit was well made, despite her disdain for Halloween, and somehow both enticing and frightening. The dress hugged her lean form, except for the puffy short skirt and frilly petticoat ending at the tops of her thighs.
An orange yarn wig with pigtails jutting at angles from her head curtained a greasepaint-paled face. Ruby red lips blended into a drawn-on stitch smile that arched to her cheekbones. The novelty glasses, round lenses tinted to look like big buttons, did not add the element of harmless whimsy that Ruth imagined they did. However, they did render her a stranger to all but the most scrutinizing passerby.
Despite the need for anonymity, she made sure to place her crucifix over her costume where she could touch it.
The gingham bag at her side was more than an accessory. It held several handfuls of tainted candy, as well as the .38 she had taken from the ol’ boys who now rotted in a pit of pumpkin guts along with that filthy Angelo. Another box of the special candy sat hidden behind a dumpster.
She hopped the barricade and walked along the line, joining the pre-parade warm up crew. “Here we are, brethren!” she called as she handed out little orange-and-black-wrapped horror shows to adults and teens. “Have a blessed evening!”
An eight-year-old girl in a cow costume ran toward her, hoof-gloved hand held out for a “treat.”
Ruth leaned close, her insane smile and dead button-eye glasses making the child recoil. “Why hello, little one!” she crooned, taking baby steps toward the little girl. “Can you say please?”
The child’s mother walked up behind her to stand quiet and uncomfortable.
“Oh, well,” Ruth crooned. “Here you go anyway.”
The child looked up at her mother, who said. “It’s okay,”
The girl took the candy, and Ruth grinned like a joker in a rigged deck. “Bye-bye, now!”
Then came a startling sound of screams from the four-way intersection a hundred yards away. People in the crowd craned their necks, murmuring.
First a man, then a woman, then a dozen average folk of all ages appeared, panicked. “It’s coming! Get away!”
“Agh! It’s horrible!”
More screams and exclamations, then amplified shrieking laughter, followed by—silence.
Ruth caressed the outline of the pistol against her hip in the gingham bag.
A staccato cadence rose, as something heavy punched the pavement with a doomsday rhythm.